Is Self-Paced Participatory Learning Possible?

by Suraj Uttamchandani and Daniel Hickey

In this post, we discuss current efforts to offer the flexibility of self-paced learning with the interactive social engagement of participatory learning. We describe two new features in the Big Open Online Course (BOOC) on Educational Assessment that allow current learners to interact with prior learners and let learners proceed at their own pace.

Competency-Based Education, Badges, and Professional Development

by Benjamin Roome (guest blogger) and James Willis 

*Benjamin Roome, Ph.D., is Chief Product Officer for Badge List and Ethics Consultant at Ethical Resolve. 

While competency-based education (CBE) has been around for many years, a number of forces are now advancing CBE to the forefront of the educational reform. Major initiatives include the U.S. Department of Education, the Lumina Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and many others. This, in turn, is transforming how students, institutions, and employers think about education. Moving away from the traditional metric of “seat time,” proponents of CBE suggest representing learning through the lens of specific competencies. This has re-ignited a debate that has been simmering for decades, which helps highlight one of the many ways digital badges may serve educational reform more broadly.

2015 Learning Impact Awards Announced!

by Gina Howard and James Willis

This year saw the 9th annual worldwide Learning Impact Awards competition put on by IMS Global Consortium. The Learning Impact Awards program encourages and recognizes the exploration and use of technology in diverse contexts within educational institutions where observable and measurable results have been achieved. A panel of expert evaluators select the winners using a series of rubrics to evaluate eight dimensions for improving teaching and learning impact. Given the recent partnership between IMS and Mozilla Open Badge, we were pleased to see that badges were central to the efforts of at least one of the winners.

Hollywood Airbrush Tanning Academy Issues Digital Badges

By Dan Hickey

My web crawler just picked up an intriguing new use of open badges as digital credentials for workplace competencies.  Hollywood Airbrush Tanning Academy partnered with Credly to offer digital badges for their graduates.  It was interested enough that I called Academy owner Simone Emmons to learn more. Sure enough, this example highlights some key points about alternative digital credentials.

IMS Global Seeks Members for Its Newest Initiative with Mozilla Foundation

By Gina Howard and James Willis 

On April 21, 2015, the IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS/ IMS Global) announced the creation of the IMS Digital Credentialing Initiative. This new initiative will aim to accelerate the adoption, integration, and transferability of digital credentials and badges in schools, institutions, and corporations. With this new initiative, they are now seeking to form a group of IMS Digital Credentialing charter members.

Amanda Opperman on Competency-Based Badging

by Gina Howard and James Willis

In a recent meeting with Amanda Opperman, a blogger for Wonderlic, James Willis and Dan Hickey discussed the implications of awarding competency-based, open digital badges in the evolving workplace. Wonderlic is a private company that has been offering businesses and schools with a comprehensive library of assessments and surveys for each phase of the hiring and student selection process for the last 75 years. Wonderlic is beginning to explore the potential of competency-based, open digital badges associated with their assessments of vocational competencies, starting with criminal justice and health care.

MOUSE Badges: Learning from Successful Projects

by James Willis and Gina Howard

As we finalize the soon-to-be published Design Principles Documentation (DPD) findings, we would like to highlight one particularly successful project: MOUSE. Marc Lesser, Education Director at MOUSE, recently posted an insightful blog entry, Why We Badge: Five reasons we set out to design a digital badging system for learners at MOUSE five years ago. Highlighting some of Lesser's points, we also can discuss what the DPD team found to be true about the MOUSE badging system.

Impacting Teacher Leanring through PPD and TPCK

by Rebecca C. Itow

On Friday, I gave a talk on this paper at the SITE conference in Las Vegas on the relationship between Participatory Professional Development and Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPCK). Generally, I asserted that all of these innovations in technology are changing the ways learners interact with information, learning environments, their teachers, and each other. They are more connected – to everything – which means that we need to reenvision our understandings of what learning environments look like, how to design for them, and what counts as “engagement” and “learning” within them. However, this also means that we need to reenvision what professional development looks like and the ways in which it presents new information to teachers so that they can learn how to design for and teach  in these new environments. 

Read more here.
  

A Few Recent Badges Publications

by James Willis 

It's wonderful to see open digital badges research expanding rapidly. We have a brief list (with links) of recent papers that might be of interest to those studying badges. This is one effort our new project, Open Badges in Higher Education.

Open Badges at SXSWedu

by James Willis 

SXSWedu, one of the premiere educational technology conferences, will be held in a few weeks (March 9 - 12). With a very full schedule, we are happy to see several prominent panel discussions on open badges.